'Silver Linings Playbook' and 'Frances Ha' charm in Toronto

Due to a looming Film Journal deadline, this editor’s time at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is limited to three and a half days. Which is especially regrettable, since this year’s lineup of films appears especially strong. By the time I leave Tuesday morning, I’ll have seen 19 selections, but there are at least two or three times that number on the schedule that are oh-so-tantalizing.

Of course, no one can catch all that TIFF has to offer, with its program of 289 features and its status as the launching pad for so many of the fall’s prestigious new movies. Two of my personal highlights so far are highly satisfying new comedies from proven indie auteurs: David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook and Noam Baumbach’s Frances Ha.

Following his Oscar-nominated dramatic success with The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook finds
Russell returning to the screwball ensemble territory of his early gem Flirting with Disaster. (I’ll refrain from mentioning the one Russell film I actively dislike, I Heart Huckabees.) Bradley Cooper, in surely his best role to date, plays Pat Solatano, a former high-school teacher just released from a psychiatric facility where he was committed after violently beating a colleague he discovered naked in the shower with his wife. Pat is struggling with bipolar disorder—not the usual source of comedy, but there is something undeniably droll about a grown man waking up his parents at four a.m. to vent when he discovers Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms has an unhappy ending. It runs in the family, as they say: Pat’s dad (Robert De Niro gifted with his best part in years) has OCD and a panoply of superstitions tied to his illegal football betting operation.

At a dinner party, Pat meets someone who seems almost equally troubled: Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), an outspoken, mercurial young woman who went into a messy tailspin after the death of her cop husband. The chemistry between Cooper and the comically agile Lawrence is sensational, but their emotional wounds make a very persuasive obstacle to the inevitable, especially in light of Pat’s obsession with winning his wife back despite a restraining order.
The humor here is as quirky as anything in Flirting with Disaster, but the diverse characters (from a well-reviewed novel by Matthew Quick) are never less than engaging, the entire cast is on their game, and the sleek comedic structure (culminating in a dance competition and major football game happening simultaneously) is worthy of Billy Wilder. The unwieldy title may be a marketing challenge, but Silver Linings Playbook is a rare delight.

Also utterly disarming is Frances Ha, co-written by new indie couple Noah Baumbach and his star, Greta Gerwig. Traversing much the same territory as Lena Dunham’s hit HBO series “Girls,” this comedy is nonetheless a winning look at a 27-year-old New York woman whose penchant for faux pas and bad decisions makes her, in her own self-deprecating words, “undatable.” The movie begins with a montage of scenes depicting Frances’ warm relationship with her best friend and roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner), a bond that is severed when Sophie moves in with her boyfriend. A struggling apprentice in a dance company, Frances can’t get through a dinner party without putting her foot in her mouth and even turns an impulsive weekend in Paris into a mournful occasion. But Gerwig is so adorable, and her observations so on-target and amusing, we root for this neurotic, vulnerable heroine to succeed. Shot in black-and-white and punctuated by music from the French New Wave, Frances Ha is a breakthrough for indie darling Gerwig and Baumbach’s best movie since The Squid and the Whale.